VA_Mantock Posted February 17, 2023 Posted February 17, 2023 (edited) Reverse engineering the flight dynamics - sounds farfetched? Well, in the world of civilian flight simulation theres a company called A2A Simulations. For those of you who don't know about them, they've just finished a 2 year long stint developing their Accusim software for the MSFS platform, I'll let the company manager, Scott Gentile's words do the rest: "The new Accu-Sim engine is so impressive it can tell us how an airplane will fly before we even fly it. Just by building the actual airplane, prop and engine. To give an example, the first time we built the Comanche using the new physics tech I added full power and the nose went way up. And I thought "that's not right." Now keep in mind, I've flown this Comanche since 2012, over 1000 hrs. It's like a nice broken in pair of shoes. However I learned something, that we as pilots do things in the cockpit subconsciously. When a pilot adds power in an airplane, he or she naturally and without consciousness, applies forward pressure on the yoke. It's just pure habit and instinct because, after many hours of flying the brain automates this action. So I took the Comanche up to test this so I could "tune it" in the sim. It turned out it was exactly correct. Speed, attitude, climb rate, ball deflection and rudder required were spot on. No tuning required. Just to get this right before required about 100 sim load/tweak/load actions. This new tech, right out of the gates, spot on. Same exact thing happened later with the flaps. In the Comanche, with it's unique manual flaps, the nose goes up and down as if it's connected to the flap lever and stops. But in the sim after the initial nose down, the nose went up after and I thought again "this isn't right." So I went up again, hands off the yoke, dropped the flaps. Immediate nose down as I remembered so well, but when I kept my hands off the yoke, immediately after the nose went up, down, up, down, etc. until it settled. Then put the video up and played it, counted the oscillations and pitch movements, exactly the same in Accu-Sim. I know some here may thing "OK, so..." but for me, this is nirvana. It's completely changed the game for us. The extra year+ of developing this new system now seems like a bargain in comparison to what it is giving us back. So if we did make a B377 again, this new Accu-Sim engine would give us interesting insights into how that plane actually flies without us ever flying it ourselves. At this point however we are only interested in Accu-Simming airplanes we have full access too. Not just for flight physics, but many other things too. Doing airplanes we never flew (or can't fly) is something down the road. Scott" ------------------- All this to say, might there be work-arounds to building a realistic flight model for aircraft where this data is no longer available? I'm not imagining this information or question will cause any advancement to our hopes for a Pacific theatre, as I'm sure the devs have already trodden this ground many times in their quest, but I pose it as an interesting point of discussion. Regards, -Peter Edited February 17, 2023 by =LC=Mantock 4
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